Chapter 3

Meanwhile we have got to do something about our future, as we can't go on living in this furnished house, which gives me the queer unhappy feeling of not belonging anywhere in particular. The kind neighbour who offered us the shelter had another proposition, that he should vacate altogether and have us take over his lease. We are going to do it, but will have to wait some time before the transaction is completed, because we have no furniture except the broken stuff which is being mended up at the furniture dealer's in the town.

I have to go down almost daily to consult and decide whether this or that article is worth repairing. It usually resolves itself into an argument with the expert. The more he says it can't be done, the more I want it done. Of course, it is our dearest treasures that have received the deadliest damage. Meanwhile, my dear, all these matters merely fade into insignificance beside the one great tremendous yet glorious fact. Himself is going to the war.

You know how hard and often he has hammered on the War Office doors, and how his age was hurled at him, and he was bidden go and carry on the good work he was doing in his own town. Well, he has got a commission at last through the intervention of an old college friend who occupies the exalted position of A.D.M.S. to a part of the Northern Army. That means that he is the Director of Medical Service. Himself will be attached to the Black Watch and report himself first to the Headquarters in Perthshire.

Is he pleased about it? He does not say much, but he has been far more restless since the raid. Am I pleased? Cornelia, honestly I don't know. Every woman wants her man to be in this tremendous fight, but I think I am a little afraid.

Our household is sadly reduced. Two have gone to munitions from indoor service, and the gardeners have been called up. We don't need them mercifully, as we have no garden now; only a backyard. Life is being gradually shorn of some of its more dignified material attributes. No doubt they are the things that don't matter, but some of them we loved, and parting from them hurts.

This morning I read a wonderful verse in Hebrews. Every bit of the Bible takes on new meanings these days. I can't recall the chapter at this moment. I daresay, you will remember it at once. "Yet once more, signifieth the removal of these things that are shaken--as of things that are made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain." What do these words mean quite? Have I been clinging too frankly to the things that are made, and must they all go one by one, so that I may realise and grip the things that cannot be shaken?

Perhaps that is the war in a nut-shell. It is a poignant, almost a terrifying thought.

He went this morning, Cornelia, New Year's morning, "in a blast of Januar wind that blew hansel in on Robin." He looked so dear and splendid in his perfect-fitting uniform (you know he never leaves anything of that kind to chance and would go without food any day if the fit of his clothes depended on it). I was worshipping all the time and Cook, our faithful chauffeur, left the car at the door to come and see whether he could help with the leggings which were rather stiff and new--and just to take a general view. He was the picture of desolation and woe. Old servants don't like those cataclysms. They have no reserve weapons to deal with them. They are conservative to the innermost fibre of their being.

At last they drove away to catch the north-going train at the junction.

I have often envied other women when I heard them speak with conscious pride of their men at the front--but oh, Cornelia, when the door was shut and the toot of the horn echoed faintly in my ears, I forgot to be proud--and was nothing at all but a lone woman, left desolate in the house of her dreams.

*VI*

Reconstruction is now my job. Everything that could be removed from the wreckage at the North House has been removed and the ruins left to the owls and the bats. The retrieval was conducted during days of pitiless rain which accentuated the desolation. But it is all accomplished now, and I don't go around there any more.

We had twenty tons of coal buried in the debris of the old stabling, where it was housed, and the police came to tell me it would have to be removed, if I wanted to get the benefit of any, as a steady pilfering was going on. It was a tremendous job but with coal at its present price an effort had to be made to get it out. It has just been put down in the cellar of this house and the transfer cost four pounds.

In the absence of Himself, I have concluded the arrangements for an actual possession of this house, which we have taken for a term of three years. No more leaseholds for me in this country, and though a casually rented house gives one an odd feeling of insecurity--anything may happen in three years. There will have to be a little papering and painting done, just to make it clean and wholesome, and then I will bring back my poor sticks from the repairing shops, and group them in this strange new setting. It is really quite a nice house, with some points the other lacked. A great advantage when one has a depleted staff is a kitchen on the ground floor. It is a thoroughly bad kitchen, dark and gloomy, and the hot water arrangements, and facilities for cooking are positively the worst I, an experienced housewife, have ever encountered. If I had not two specimens of the salt of the earth in these regions beyond, the situation would be impossible. They are quite selfless, as far as their own comfort and accommodations are concerned. They think only of us. Such personal devotion takes the edge off many sorrows.

Already I have a scheme which perhaps in the far future will convert this house into a real home. How ineradicable is the instinct to reconstruct in the human breast! That it cannot be killed has been incontestably proved by the persistence with which our poor French and Belgian confrères creep back to their ravaged fatherland and begin again.

Himself builded better than he knew when he began to talk of reconstructing the moment the shock was over. He is always distressingly right in the fundamentals, and our small internal wars have invariably been caused by my refusal to admit it. But life is not all fundamental, Cornelia, it needs camouflage, needs it desperately. All women know it.

There are gleams of glory. The finest is the love of the people for my lover. A poor woman rushed up to me to-day to ask the latest news of him. From her I learned that they call him "The Friend of the Poor." If I were to die to-morrow, Cornelia, I could ask no sweeter epitaph.

I have decided that the house is not bad at all, and I am beginning to sit up and take a little notice. Only I must not look out of the back windows.

You remember the enchanting vistas spread before the green bedroom, and the study window around the corner. There was no fret of the spirit that could not be healed and comforted, always there was beauty to lift you up, and a message, no matter how bleak the prospect elsewhere. It was that dear intimate kind of a garden where there was something for every mood.

Doctor Horton once came to dine and sleep when speaking at a meeting here, and at six next morning he was out roaming about, to the disquiet of the staff. He had visions of a hermit's study cell in the ruined tower by the waterfall, and wondered why I did not establish a writing room out of doors.

I explained that my writing was a stern business which would admit of no distractions. I have found that even a very comfortable study is a bad place for the cultivation of thought. A wooden bench and bare walls, or the "fender end" of my childhood and a block on my knee produced the best results.

But to return to the only thing that matters at the moment. I am reduced to a cabbage patch. Even that is a misnomer, for there is not even a "Kailyaird runt" i.e. remnant, on that little ugly bit of mother earth.

It is a slice of No Man's Land that has never grown anything but weeds. It is relieved by a background of trees, our own chestnuts, Cornelia, whose glory of pink-and-white cones we used to watch till they were mirrored in all their majesty in the clean depths of the backwater above the fall.

When I want positively to revel in heartbreak, to be homesick and unashamedly miserable (which I fear I am most of the time, since Himself retired from the scene), I go to the uttermost edge of my No Man's Land, where I can hear the rush and tumble of the waterfall, though I cannot see its foaming tears.

To descend to mundane things, let me explain that this house belonged to a master-builder who once upon a time had his workshop and all the paraphernalia of his business in the backyard. After a while he secured more ambitious premises, and carried away all the plant, leaving us the legacy of a concrete floor in the very middle of the patch.

So before we can obey the Food Administrator's order to plant potatoes, the concrete will have to be broken up and removed by the hand of George Cook.

His face was a study when I explained that as the young doctor preferred to drive the car himself, his, George's, job would be to make the desert blossom like the rose. He looked at me, and then at it, queerly, with his one active eye; pulled his forelock with rather a grim smile, and went forth for a pick. Inside of an hour he had started on that task and now the thud of the pick is the music to which I waken of a morning. Sometimes consulting together (I am beginning to be interested, though I try not to be), we doubt very much whether the concrete plus the ineradicable root of an obnoxious weed called horseradish, will ever be gotten out in time for a spring crop. But Cook is very dogged; and the joy of the creator is beginning to lay hold on him. I find it is a better day's work when I potter round the patch, sympathising and anathematising turn about. Anyhow, the work of reconstruction, as ordained by Himself, is going forward cheerfully. The workmen are in possession of most of the rooms, and I am just about as uncomfortable and as busy as the most active housewife could desire to be.

My war-work has had to call a halt till I get through with this business of home making; that being the duty that lies nearest. You think I'm not saying so much as usual about Himself? I can't, because, oh, Cornelia, he seems to have passed out of my life! I get his dear letters, but they are all about people I have never seen and don't want to see, because they are there with him, seeing him every day, and I am not. He is loving the life--you know how he would--and the boys with whom he lives in the mess, himself the biggest boy of all.

In every letter I can sense the buoyancy of spirit that comes with the laying down of responsibility. Here he had so much, and now he is only a nut in the great machine of war, and so long as he does his duty and obeys orders he can have an easy and comfortable mind.

He is stationed at the moment up in what is the frozen north, but they are the hills of home, and he is assuredly content. He is not even homesick, though always asking when I am coming. I am waiting for Effie's next leave, when we will go up together. Meanwhile I must hold the fort here, or all the wrong wall papers will go up, and there might even be structural undoing if the workmen were left to their own sweet wills. But it is an empty life, Cornelia, out of which the soul has gone. Even the picture in uniform, on my desk, the man of the house at war, fails to afford the uplift or the comfort once imagined. I must get through with this reconstruction job as it affects material things, and start the reconstruction of my own inner life. I, too, must go to the war.

*VII*

I had your dear letter yesterday and have every word of it by heart, even George's postscript. I always knew him to be an understanding creature, but his knowledge of human beings, more especially the heart of woman, is a wee bit uncanny.

Is he your product, Cornelia, or is he just the American husband at his best? It is long since you told me (it was on that wonderful testing first visit which we essayed fearfully--not sure whether it would grapple us to one another with hooks of steel or merely end in a polite parting with regrets on either side) that English husbands are not properly brought up. You imagined, or really perceived, in them a lordly air of superiority--and even said that some of our households bear the impress of the feudal age in which our race was cradled.

I remember wanting to say that the criticism did not, and could not, apply to Scotch husbands. But perhaps wisely I held my peace.

We left it, what is called in Scotland "a moot point"--and a moot point, I guess, it must remain. Anyway, wherever George got his knowledge, whether natural or acquired, he has gripped the essence of this thing when he calls separation the supreme test of the bond. I am going to write to him when I am through with this, and you are not to see that letter, nor yet ask to see it--I need him--I want the man's point of view.

What is this all about anyway? I think I hear you say with the uplift of the brows which is your very own.

You, in America, with your semi-detached ideas of marriage, which enable you to bear six months' or a year's separation without any sinking of heart, or vague questionings, must naturally find it difficult to realise our point of view. With us marriage is "for keeps," as you say, and when upheaval comes, it seems always to spell disaster.

Perhaps our theory is all wrong, and an unwarrantable interference with the freedom of the individual. But I can't be happy thinking of Himself with a whole lot of new interests I can't share, making shoals of friends, which is as easy to him as breathing the air, friends whom probably I shall never see. He can guess pretty well what I am about, but I can't visualise him. Just think of the hundreds of wives, and of other women who are feeling like this, and who are at war with the war, that has brought it about.

There is another side to the picture, the side that proves the part truth of your assertion that we don't bring up our husbands properly. Let me present a little cameo of the times in which we live. I was at a war tea at a women's club in London the other day, and there met an old acquaintance I had not seen for some time. She was quite middle-aged--and had been rather dowdy, not paying much attention to her clothes. Before I spoke to her, I was arrested by a subtle change in her outward appearance. She had a smart suit on, and wore a distinctly youthful hat with a rakish air.

The thing interested me, and I had to find out its meaning.

When we exchanged greetings she informed me that her husband, retired, had gone back to professional work, which meant that he could not live at home, but at a military Headquarters.

I sympathised and asked how she got through the lonely days which I was feeling so desperately. She looked at me queerly through her shrewd candid grey eyes.

"Oh, I'm not lonely," she assured me. "In fact, _entre nous_, I'm having the time of my life."

"Tell me about it," I asked breathlessly, and she told----

"Well, I go out and in as I like, do all the things I have always wanted to do, but could not. Nobody now asks me where I've been or what I've spent. In fact, I don't really think I have any more use for Dan."

There, Cornelia--it will make you smile, perhaps, but there is a tragedy behind it. Poor old Dan! comfortable, complacent, no doubt inflated by a new sense of his own importance because his country still needs him, to what strange and hostile atmosphere will he return! I can imagine him rubbing his eyes and wiping his _pince nez_ and saying, "Tut, tut, this will never do!"

But he won't be able to put back the clock. He'll have to march to the new marching tune.

I foresee ructions in the household of Dan.

Meanwhile, she is having the time of her life!

It makes no appeal to me, because I have always been able to have the time of my life, as she understands it. I have gone in and out without let or hindrance, none daring to make me afraid. And now, I am just a lonely creature like a bit of drift on the shore.

There is another side to which George calls the supreme test--a horrible sordid side. Hear it now. When I went to France first in 1915, to talk to the boys, I was asked whether I would go to a small forage camp in a God-forsaken place away up near Abbeville, beyond the British Headquarters. It was a kind of No Man's Land which nobody ever visited. Lectures and concert parties passed it by. I said, "Of course I'll go, it is what I've come out for."

So Effie and I got up at four o'clock in the morning to catch the only available civilian train leaving Rouen for "up the line." The distance could not be far, according to the map, but it took us till three o'clock in the afternoon to get there. We were shunted into sidings to let troop trains and ammunition trains and hospital trains go by, and there were no passengers in ours except French officers and other people connected with the war.

No women, but we two. I was so thankful to have Effie. Her gay inconsequence, her complete disregard of everything but the great adventure, helped us over every stony bit of the ground. Gendarmes, sentries with fixed bayonets, grumpy passport and permit officials--she captured them all. Youth is quite invincible, and when its smile is sweet like hers obstacles melt like mist before the rising sun. If I had even attempted that wonderful journey through the war zone without her I should either have been shot as a spy, or interned for the duration. It is short shrift for the middle-aged and the ordinary beings who can't explain their business in the area where death and destiny walk side by side. Well, in course of time, through several minor adventures, we reached our destination.

A sturdy little divinity student from Aberdeen was holding the fort there for the Y.M.C.A. and holding it well. When he went first to give them a bit of humanizing Christian comradeship, he had to sleep with a revolver under his pillow, fully aware that any night he might get his throat cut. These men were not soldiers, though they wore khaki, but rough east-enders, dock laborers, most of them, with lawless anarchic blood in their veins. They had spent the major part of their lives rebelling against law and order. They were the husbands of some of the women whose faces broke your heart when I took you to my big mothers' meeting "down east" two years ago. The fortunes of war had cut them off from the grime and glory of the Barking Road, and those in authority found them a tough proposition in that sweet valley in the pleasant land of France.

We pottered about the camp till nightfall, when the men gathered into the tent to hear the woman who had brought them a message from home.

I knew when I stood up in front of them and saw their faces, looking grim and unrelenting through the haze of tobacco smoke and the reek of the oil lamp, that I was up against something, and would need not only all my art, but the grace of God to help me through.

But I got them after a bit, got them in the hollow of my hand--playing on their hearts with memories of home, though all the time I knew the kind of homes they had left, and how hard most of them had made it there for the women they had vowed to love, honour and cherish.

When the talk was over they crowded round and one particularly unattractive person with a scowling eye inquired whether he could have a word with me privately. We managed it later on in a remote corner, hard by one of the evil-smelling lamps.

"'Ere, missus," he began. "Do yer 'appen to know the Barkin' Road?"

I eagerly asserted my complete familiarity with the Barking Road, the Kings' Highway to Dockland! I was even ready to proclaim it the finest thoroughfare in the world.

"See here, then, Lidy, thet was good talk, but it don't go far enough. Maybe I weren't all I should a bin w'en I was back there, but my missus she ain't played the game, she's played it low down on me since I've been in this 'ere war. I ain't had no letters from 'er for over four months, and I carnt 'ear nuthink about the four kids nah, but a bloke wot lives dahn our street sends me word that she's sold up the whole bloomin' shoot and nobody knows where she is, and the kids is in the Union. An' I carnt git out of this blarsted 'ole to see to the kids and give 'er wot for. Wot are ye goin' to do about it, Lidy?" That was what people call a tough proposition, Cornelia, the whole tragedy of one-half of the war in a nutshell.

I did what I could. I tried to comfort him and took down all the particulars in the note book already bulging with behests, which it will probably take me the rest of my natural life to fulfil.

When I got back to England I made the inquiries, put the Salvation Army angel on the track, and found it all just as he described. His missus has never been found--she has gone down in the underworld, urged there by the very same temptations which made Dan's wife say she had no more use for Dan. Tasting independence of action and of purse for the first time, she lost her sense of proportion. With the well-to-do, it is the sweets of independence that is testing them--with the other sort, the lure of the separation allowances, which means more money in hand than they had ever dreamed of before in their poor, narrow, sordid lives.

There's something all wrong with life, Cornelia. It will have to be straightened out and evened up, and the poor and the oppressed will have to taste a little of the glory and the beauty and the dignity of life.

Perhaps that is what the war is for.

Meanwhile the poor bond!

It will have to be recast in the new world we are coming to.

How many of us will stand the test?

Himself has been back on his first leave. It is Sunday night, he has just gone, and the door is shut again; leaving me inside while he is speeding away back to the unknown. It has been a lovely heartbreaking time. But he is detached, Cornelia, he doesn't belong any more. I had made superhuman efforts to get the whole house in order, sitting up late at night to cover cushions and put in all the fixings that make the real home. He was very polite, looking industriously at everything, and all the time his eyes were not seeing my poor little attempts at home-making--but something else far away. All he said was, "It's very nice, but I have all I want in a tent," He didn't mean to be cruel; he was only gripped by his new life, saw the mess table with his comrades round about him--the route march--the sham attack, all the pomp and preparation for the real war they are going out to presently. The things no woman can share; or can be asked to share!

It is the man's life, the big grey splendid thing which we are outside of, not once in a while, but forever and ever.

He has changed, Cornelia--not to me, but he has gotten the vision of the fierce arena where men are fighting and dying that Liberty may live; has not only gotten the vision, but has become part of it.

And I am only the woman left by the fireside. I don't see the glory of the war as I used. The envy I felt towards the women who spoke proudly of their men at the front has died utterly. I don't want him at the front. I want him _here_ desperately, every minute of the time. He doesn't feel like that. He can do without me.

You said somewhere that since George heard that Himself has gone, he is, like Carlyle, "gey ill to live with," cursing the waiting policy of the President, the everlasting framing of notes full of dignified protest about nothing in particular.